chunyu huang

Social networking online as become increasing popular for establishing relationships with friends, acquaintances, or strangers. MySpace, Facebook, and Windows Live Spaces are among some of the most popular network platforms today.

Windows Live Space had started out as MSN Spaces, which was launched in early December 2004 with the aim of allowing its users to reach out in an easy way to others by publishing their thoughts, photos and interests, while competing with sites like MySpace and Yahoo!’s 360°. On the 1st of August 2006, MSN Spaces became part of the Windows Live services platform, where it is now rebranded with a heavy emphasis on social networking features aimed at a younger audience. 

Windows Live Space for example has recently made several changes to their site that increased the flexibility of customization, influencing the look-and-feel and the space and improved user-experience. It also provided better tracking of who updated their space.  In Windows Live Spaces Debuts article, Niall Kennedy, who left blog search engine Technorati to work on Microsoft on Windows Live, commented: The new friends integration is the real hotness, allowing users to define their relationships and see more information about the people who matter most. The friends module shows Messenger presence and status messages and adds a “gleam” next to any contact with a recently updated space. Friends lists are browsable within a Spaces web page as well as within that contact’s mini-profile (contact card) within Messenger.

As a user of Windows Live Space, the space is attractive because of its integration with MSN Messenger and hotmail, both of which I use often. I found myself using many of the functionalities that come along with the recent upgrade. The update status messages are especially convenient and time-efficient rather than going through everyone’s spaces for updates.  I have the ability to customize the permissions to my messenger and space as well.  Also, Microsoft added gadges and modules which allowed for highterlevels of customization.  This is important because the contents are user-generated and users are seeking the ablity to brand and express themselves through the look-and-feel.

However, though it has many strength, Windows Live Spaces is not  friendly towards  blogs that are not part of windows live spaces or emails that are not part of msn messengers. Customized lists have to be made to create links to blog sites that are not spaces.live.com. In addition, Windows Live Spaces has a heavy censorship on content that gets posted. The question of “this is my space and my sight and why is it that I can’t post exactly what I want to say”  comes up. A funny exploration on what words are censored can be found in the article MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs on BoingBoing.

Due to the wide variety of platforms available for music, blogging, photo sharing and so on, competitors establishing and maintaining an online presence are seeking to match or update the services and functionality of their competitors. Are all these copying beneficial? It is good for users because it prompts sites to provided services and features that others users have availabe to them. However, there are also differentiation, strengths and weaknesses, that drive certain users to use one site or create multiple accounts on different sites. Users now have more options to integrate or separate their identities or contents as much as they like. Soon, companies will have to shift to developing some service or platform that provide or evolve into something new and interesting once all these add-ons and services are explored.  

Readings:

Face to interface (http://economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9981022)

Windows Live Spaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Spaces)

MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs (http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/02/msn-spaces-seven-dir.html)

Windows Live Spaces Debuts(http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/08/02/windows-live-spaces-debuts)